Posts Tagged ‘HPLinux’

As the sessions I proposed for the event weren’t accepted, I considered I had no chance to attend this year SUSECon. But it turned out that there was a need for HPE to have someone able to talk about Helion OpenStack on the booth, and I have been chosen to do it, so I’ll be around this year, for the first time, from the 25th to the 29th of September, in the beautiful city of Prague (will be my 4th time there !).

I’ll look forward meeting with some of my SUSE friends over there, and discover a new event.

Of course, as usual feel free to come and talk to me (I should be on the HPE booth when it’s open) of OpenStack, SUSE CaaS (as we’re working on a Reference Architecture on Synergy) and of course Open Source in general, and early music in particular 😉

Pretty busy week no ?! And you should be able to replay the labs/tutorials on Wednesday afternoon during the OpenLab session in Lab 1.

A lot of sessions are covering Docker related topics this year, and I’m happy with thatas it’s a great techno, even more with the recently announced 1.13 bringing service support to docker-compose !

For those of you wondering why project-builder.org and MondoRescue versions are not published more regularly, that gives you again a hint 😉 Not speaking of the travel for 2 weeks starting the week after this one, and the next event in March in Grenoble, TES, where I’m part of the Event team and that we’ll organize for the 8th time.

See you there to talk of these subjects or something else as you see fit. I’m around the whole week.

This time I’d like to detail the latest news around the standard itself, how it can be used in an Ironic context and what we’ll have to do to make it work, up to its usage for Alexandria, a CMDB as a service solution we’re also developing in conjunction with these components.

I’ll also attend most of the Ironic dev round table to organize that work, and understand better what the community is expecting from us with regards to the development, and answer to the questions around the specification. Should be a very interesting week in Barcelona (on top of the fact Barcelona is a great city I encourage you to visit !)

Bdale has announced today that he was leaving HPE again. 2 years after he came back all of us FLOSSers inside HPE are orphaned again. He didn’t stay longer than Martin Fink and thus we have now lost the best and most influential FLOSS ambassadors inside the company.

I hope we’ll be able to persue their great accomplishements, as HPE is always considered a fair FLOSS player, helping communities, involved on many projects, pushing GPLv3 (“Copyleft is good” said Martin Fink at LinuxCon EMEA in 2015), partnering with important FLOSS vendors, or with important projects like Bdale with Debian, in summary playing its role inside the overall Open Source community.

I wish to both of them to enjoy their retirements, and hope to cross again their paths soon in upcoming events, where I’m sure, they will always be received as the advocates they are deserve. And many thanks for everything you did to make some of our dreams real.

Of course I’ll enjoy attending many sessions on various topics, and will see if in EMEA as well Docker Orchestration is the new Eldorado this year (In Toronto many talks and booth were dedicated to that theme). At least my colleague Mike Bright will cover it well !

I already mentioned last year that I initiated a tutorial to help discovering Docker. This was based on the work done in the Docker Dojo during a Grenoble Docker Meetup. It has evolved to really become a nice tutorial that you can easily play on your own, with your Linux laptop, using a trial and error approach. We’ve got lots of positive feedback on it, such as the one expressed publicly by Herman Robers.

There are articles to do this in a pure Debian environment, such as the excellent one I used as a base from Raphaël Hertzog.

But my deployment server in that case is a CentOS 6 one, so I needed some adaptations to make it work.

My target system is a HPE ProLiant BL 460 Gen9, equiped with bnx2x NICs (Broadcom BCM 57840 10/20 Gb/s cards). And during a network boot install, I have had messages indicating that the firmware was missing (failed to load bnx2x/bnx2x-…)

And you should be able to meet the Geeks on Wednesday afternoon, myself included.

Other subject of interest are the breakouts 86 (Intro to open source infra automation tools), 48 (container and next gen architecture), and 151 (building an open source high perf object storage cluster with Ceph) and of course the Labs (the Redfish and UEfI ones in particular) and SuSE and Red Hat sponsor sessions. Lots to see !

For those of you wondering why project-builder.org and MondoRescue versions are not published more regularly, that gives you again a hint 😉 Not speaking of the next event in March in Grenoble, TES, where I’m part of the Event team this time.

See you there to talk of these subjects or something else as you see fit. I’m around the whole week.

First it’s friendly. I’ve been invited to talk about the interactions between a hardware manufacturer such as HP and the Linux community. And honestly, not being a kernel developer, I think I was more invited because of my firendly relationships with the organizers of the event, rather than for my relevance to the event. Hopefully, I’ve been able to bring some appropriate info anyway.

Then it’s remaining a small event, gathering around 100 people, all very committed to Linux kerel development. Small but highly focussed. To be honest, again as I’m not a kernel developer, I had a hard time following most of the conferences once they started digging into some aspects of the kernel.

And it’s great because of the high quality of the speakers present on stage (myself excluded). Look at the schedule, and realize that it was near a Kernel Summit as it can be without being one ! And I only attended day 2 and 3.

We had first David Woodhouse from Intel on Device Tree and ACPI. Typical session where I understand only parts of the talk, not being involved in embedded world. For the dummies on this topic like me, I’d recommend Thomas Petazzoni’s presentation as a starting point.

He was followed by the star of the event Greg Kroah Hartman, fellow at the Linux Foundation and who is after Linus the one devoting the most to the kernel especially on stable branches. And as for every great speaker, you can give them whatever topic to cover, they make it interesting. Even more when they have chosen it, and didn’t make that talk since a couple of years. It was brilliant. With live publication of two RCs and an official stable kernel release named … “Kernel Recipes” of course 🙂 That talk was really inspiring and lively as you can see:

And Greg was talking, as well as all other speakers in a very nice room (Lended by the Mozilla Foundation) completely full ! And I think most people were like me impressed by the level of git+mutt mastery Greg showed, as well as the automation he developed to help him. I couldn’t have thought it was so “easy” to publish 3 different branches of the kernel while explaining everything in parallel in a 50 minutes talk !!!

William Dauchy from the french registrar Gandi was then on stage to explain their network usage (large layer 2 LAN spread across DCs with TRILL).

In the afternoon, we had a talk from Eric Leblond on packet filtering and the Suricata IDS. Pretty clear again and a deep knowledge on this topic.

And then François Romieu explained his practice around Ethernet drivers development. I must confess I had difficulties following that talk, which I fuond less well architectured with probably too much digressions, while being very comitted.

An auction was then organized in order to support La Quadrature du Net in their activities. It was an excellent idea IMO, and was lead y Erwan Velu who suceeded to generate great interest from the audience. I didn’t won an auction, but I’m anyway a sponsor of La Quadrature.

I had time to pass the evening with my older daughter (and we enjoyed a great concert at the Philharmonie de Paris with a fabulous Stabat Mater of Rossini, the choirs lead by Lionel Sow in particular)

The 2nd of October, the organizers had as many key kernel contributors as I described for the second day !
We started with Jan Kara to explain IOs, followed by another kernel major actor, Jens Axboe, working now for FaceBook and who was extremely didactic in his way to explain storage scalability aspects. Again an excellent talk to recommend.

Mike Turquette was then on stage for explaining driver framework followed by an active contributor to the event by his questions and feedback, Willy Tarreau, who again made an excellent presentation on stable kernels, maintenance of these and which one to choose to build products, such as what he does in his company around HA Proxy.

I had to leave before the end of that day, but I was impressed by the quality of the event, the level of the speakers, the ability to gather so many big names in the same place, and also the active participation of the audience, and the fact that speakers stay in the room to listen to other talks and contribute back. That’s how events are the most efficient IMO.

So very honored to have been invited, many thanks to the organizers (especially Anne and Erwan) and I hope next time HP will accept to sponsor this very valuable event for the Linux kernel community.

While I’m involved this week in the delivery of an OpenStack fast track training, we’ll have our 7th Rhône-Alpes-Auvergne OpenStack Meetup next Tuesday in Lyon where we’ll talk about deployment method for OpenStack, covering ansible on the HP side. I’ll then be in Paris for the 2015 edition of Kernel Recipes talking about Hardware Manufacturer and Linux kernel relationships, based on my HP background.

As usual if you want to meet and talk about anything related to Open Source or Early Music, feel free !